Customized Fab 40 Help Desk Template

Scenario

• Develop an enterprise Help Desk application using MOSS 2007 with SP Designer 2007
• Also include the following features
• Custom alerts
• State change based notifications
• State machine workflows
• Customer notifications
• Change Request integration
• Promotion from Ticket
• Child Work Items
• Work Item integration
• Key Perfomance Indicators
• Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• Calculated Fields
• Deadline notification
• Approval workflows
• Custom Fields
• Custom Add Item Forms
• Cascaded Dropdowns

Issue

• The Fab 40 Help Desk template is a basic starting point and lacks the above features

Resolution

• I recently architected a solution implementing these requirements.  It's too much info to post here, but please contact me for details on how this can be accomplished.
• Parent child relationships require a 3rd party Cascading Lookup control

Emailed HTML Rich Text Column Relative URLs

Scenario

• You have a list with a multi line text column with Enhanced Rich Text.
• The item contains links from the current server.
• You are emailing the contents of that column via SharePoint Designer 2007 Workflows

Issue

• The hyperlinks in the email do not work.
• The server name was automatically stripped from the URL, making a relative path.

Resolution

• Workaround:
• Add the following note to the field description notifying users of the problem and the workaround.
• "Use http://TinyUrl.com for hyperlinks and images on this site.  This will prevent emailed relative links."
• This works because SharePoint only strips URLs it recognizes as local URLs
• These are usually defined in the Alternate Access Mappings
• You can use any URL redirector
• Fixes:
• Use Visual Studio Workflows and replace the Relative URLs with Absolute URLs
• Intercept the outbound emails (on the SharePoint or Email servers) and replace
• Use a custom Workflow Action that prepends the servername into the URLs
• Use a different field type.  Try different custom Rich Text editor columns.